Free entrance!
Contemporary art practice has come to occupy an increasingly expanded field, shifting understandings of the artist as a single cultural actor and opening up an extended collaborative and aesthetical platform. The autumn lecture series seeks to query this expanded territory, drawing on the work of invited international artists to enliven debate on art’s role as a catalyst for reconfiguring social life.
Annika Eriksson is a Swedish artist living in Berlin. She initiates everyday situations, collective actions, and presentations that are manifest in video or film installations and as photographs in the exhibition space. The participants, or rather those who are portrayed, act within an artificial and playful frame provided by the artist, in which the ‘free speech’ of each action takes possession of the exhibition space in a largely autonomous manner. With long-lasting takes and a fixed camera the works mark out a transparent line of separation between documentation and staging, between reality and fiction. She keeps returning to a continual reflection upon friction of reality. It is that which is slightly out of joint, somewhat displaced which tends to grab her attention. From this initial fascination with discord she builds the parameters for another event, setting a further stage of action. The situations she is creating are in this sense rooted in life; yet, tend to transcend it as a form of hyper reality.
During 2010 she was commissioned works for daadgalerie Berlin, Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin and Hayward Gallery in London. She is now working with commissions for Europe N, GFZK, Leipzig, Public Folklore, Grazer Kunstverein, Specters of the Nineties, Marres Centre for Contempory Art, Maastrich and Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart.